A Death in the Rainforest

It’s dumb to critique charity. There is no upside for doing so. That said, I’m skeptical of programs and policies that keep people comfortable in their poverty. It may be politically incorrect to say so, but the British did more good for indigenous people by building railroads, post offices, and offering good, steady jobs (that then let them pay for the things that they needed) than all the NGO charity in the world.

That has its place but it’s not substitute for the basic infrastructure of a modern Western society — politically, economically, and socially.



The thing is, I don’t want to travel to New York. It has its place. But aspects of it make it truly live up to its name of “the urban jungle.”

Our intrepid author has finally run into the principal of “No good deed goes unpunished.” In truth, the villagers were doing him a favor by indulging his research. But the author felt it necessary to give out small gifts as token of thanks — if at least as a way of reciprocating for the food he was often brought and the hut they build for him. He gave them batteries, kerosene for their lamps, rubber bands (a favorite items for the kids), balloons (ditto), and other trinkets. But the favorite of all (he included a record in the book of what he typically gave in a two-week period) was butane lighters. People would come to his door and in a sheepish way sort of beg for stuff.

But a disgruntled villager who thought the hadn’t been given enough began spreading rumors that the anthropologist had $40,000 in cash on him. One night a gang of five brutes beat him up, ransacked his house, and killed one of the villagers. Ironically, it turned out that the villager killed was a relative of some of the local villagers who were in cahoots with the bandits.

Everyone knew that there had to be a local connection because the route into the village is all but impossible to find without help. For instance, the small river that is the final leg is hidden amongst a wall of trees and roots in a labyrinthian mangrove swamp. You can’t see the river. You have to know where it is. And the mangrove swamp itself is indeed a labyrinth just to get to that point.

The author stays around the village after the robbery and murder for four days waiting for the police to arrive and to grieve with the villagers. He rightly assumes it wouldn’t look good for him to rush right off. But after four days, and with the criminals still knowingly on the loose in the area (their canoes were found and destroyed), he thinks it’s better if he gets out of there.

Groups of bandits, called “rascals,” become a large phenomenon on New Guinea. And it isn’t until 14 years later, after receiving a letter from one of the villagers, that he returns. Meanwhile, during his initial flight, he reported the incident to his insurance company in Australia who paid out a cash amount to the relatives of the murdered man, the thinking (rightly) being that it was the presence of the anthropologist that lead to the death.

But when he returns to the village after all those years, there are still murmuring low-level threats from the family that everyone suspects had something to due with the robbery and murders. The author himself became sure of this. They now want compensation even though the insurance company already paid out money. But the money went to the widow and the murdered man’s sons, not these other relatives.

Our author sees the writing on the wall. He doesn’t want to lose his research notes or risk his life. So after nine months, he cuts his stay short and secretly arranges for a helicopter to take him out.

He returned the following year (in 2010), “making sure to purchase a gigantic two-hundred-pound bag of betel nut in town to bring with me.” That was to be basically a bribe and peace offering. It worked. The dangerous rumblings from the relatives died down. But the author concludes this particular chapter by writing, “From that point onwards, the threats subsided. The danger, though, ultimately didn’t.” The very next chapter is titled “Who Killed Monei?” and that’s where I’ve left it, 73% into the book.

I finished “A Death in the Rainforest” although I did skip through a chapter or two. One chapter is devoted to dreams and it just seemed liked filler (or virtue signaling) as if he had to show he so intimately cared for the villagers. I’m sure he did, but some of this stuff, particularly near the end of the book, did seem either like filler or virtue-signaling—perhaps both.

The book is good when it is descriptive. What’s it like to live in the jungle of New Guinea? What are the people like? What does the jungle consist of? How do the people cope? What is their history? How does the anthropologist interact with them? What hardships must they overcome? What special knowledge or skills do they have?

That part was mostly good. But as a work of scholarship it seems to be a failure. And I don’t mean that this book was his PhD thesis. He wrote that up elsewhere and admitted himself that it was dry and lifeless. And this more popular-oriented book is definitely (mostly) readable. He does a good job in that regard.

But the conclusions he draws from it seem to be a failure. The paradigm he is operating under can provide him with no successful way to understand the situation. If Christianity is a bad influence, if capitalism is a bad influence, if he’s quoting Karl Marx (some quote about how people don’t write their own history—it still made no sense in context), and the natives themselves are judged as victims, then what answer can you ever come up with that is of any help?

The book is centrally about a disappearing language. And he is somewhat frank (and also somewhat disingenuous…playing to the sensibilities of his academic pals) about why and if this matters. However you feel about this, in the end, he has not at all made the case that the villagers are losing anything by moving from their local language of Tayap to Tok Pisin. The author virtue-signals to his colleges that, yes, losing a language might lose some special knowledge about plant cures and that type of thing, and that the language itself should be be appreciated if for nothing other than “diversity.” But I remain unsold on any of these ideas, especially since the villagers themselves (a harsh bunch they were) didn’t seem to care thing-one about losing it.

The adoption of Tok Pisin is framed (not without good reason) as a symptom of being culturally poisoned (or at least changed) by outsiders, everyone from Australians, capitalists, and missionaries to the Japanese during WWII. That’s all fair enough. But I would say, again, the author has not made the case that their culture was worth preserving. One glimpse at the outside world and they wanted modernism, not mud.

And yet the villagers themselves were such superstitious and ignorant savages, they had no way to even marginally understand the modern world. They (like Obama voters) still viewed riches as something to be magically bestowed. You just needed to find “the road” which always, in some way, meant obtaining white skin as well.

That these villagers had been exploited is without question (often enough by their own politicians or other tribes). They were about as ignorant as ignorant could be.  (All throughout his time there, for example, they all truly believed that the anthropologist was one of their dead ancestors who had come to visit them.) They had (as this author did not) any useful framework out of the jungle, either literally or figuratively. The author’s conclusion is that it is the duty of the West to “share” with them. Fine. But share what? Free stuff? I would say the thing to be shared is education, the infrastructure of modern law and banking, the infrastructure of a modern political system, and the infrastructure of a moral system that is not based upon the thin banana-republic paradigms which leads to little more than third-world corruption.

That is, you can’t get out of the jungle by being anti-Western and anti-White. You can “honor” these natives all you want. You can, and should, assist them with NGO-supplied health care and things like that. But there is no progress in simply putting a band-aid on ignorance and bad ethics. My impression of these natives is that no one has any conception of needing to earn something. (And, granted, often when they tried to — they might grow tobacco of cocoa crops for sale — it didn’t work well or they were being taken advantage of.) Perhaps most importantly, they were poor, weak, and unorganized in regards to having a clear goal for themselves, of looking out for their own interests. Whatever consensus they had was almost always about finding a magical “road” to the white man’s riches — basically a cargo-cult mentality.

Even Karl Marx can’t fix that.

That’s a good point. Although I wouldn’t commend what is basically Pigeon English as an upgrade, I think its existence shows some of the problems faced by the villagers. They’d have been better off simply learning proper English as a second language. Did they want to? Were the Europeans resistant to such a thing? Or was the mindset of the tribe such that this was all they were capable of or perhaps they wanted to not totally ape the English? I really don’t know and the book, in my opinion, fails at answering some of these (to me) obvious questions.

My understanding is that this particular Pigeon English sort of just formed on its own. Therefore, it was conceivably the worst off all worlds. It’s wasn’t English proper (so it would be easy for outsiders to look down on these “primitives” for their gibberish— certainly many in Indian did learn to speak English well and thus could participate in the British bureaucracy…and were thus later able to self-govern themselves). Nor was it their ancestral language which at least had served them well and might obviously contain elements that were adapted to the harsh environment in which they lived. (Eskimos have many words for “snow,” for example, to distinguish between different kinds that are materially different.)

To the best of my understanding, they ditched Tayap in favor of Tok Pisin because they wished to escape their own backward way of life. Tok Pisin had become (ironically, from an English-speaking person’s point of view) the more cultured language. It was spoken (taken up by necessity) by those tribesman who left the village to find employment. (And, as I had mentioned, they thought the Westerners who were speaking real English were just incompetent when it came to speaking proper Tok Pisin — which leaves you wondering how attuned to reality many of these tribesmen were.)

Also, as I had mentioned, the women in this village seemed to be as maternal as sharks. What also arose with the presence of Tok Pisin was the use of Tayap more for insults (or for first, and somewhat less serious, warnings). And then if one spoke the same words in Tok Pisin that is when one really meant it. That sounds sort of like my parents saying “Bradley” instead of just “Brad.” If they said “Bradley,” you knew were in trouble.

Young people also used Tayap when they were joking around and basically mocking their own culture and traditions. If they wanted to lampoon the supposed backward customs of their elders, they would speak in Tayap amongst themselves. And everyone knew they were just being sarcastic.

It’s really rather embarrassing to see less respect for idyllic (so-called) jungle life from the insiders than perhaps from many of the outsiders. And many of the outsiders (whether this anthropologist or well-meaning missionaries or Australian entrepreneurs) might arguably have had more respect for them as a people than some of them had for themselves.

There is, to my mind, no simple answer and no villain who can be singled out. This culture was just so different and irrational that it left them extremely vulnerable to handing change — or to enact it, even if they said it is what they wanted.

The differences between Amish and primitive cultures are many but boil down to one critical item. The cargo cult culture in New Guiena and others in South America are for the most part unknowledgeable of modern society. The Amish made a well informed decision to halt progress at a certain point of industrial progress, not out of fear of progress but to maintain a life style they find superior to "English culture". If anything Amish culture, in the eyes of Amish. is superior to the outside culture.

Most Amish and Minnonite communities have made well considered accommodations with modern culture. They don't have telephones in their homes but if required by their business the use them with the blessings of the community. They go to doctors and hospitals when ill. The dress code is restrictive, but inexpensive and is practical for rural life. They are far and wide known as the best, most productive organic farmers on the planet and willingly accept that about 1/3 of their crops will be consumed by insects and blight.

Communities are growing across the country. There is a very large community in Eastern Oklahoma, even a small community in, of all places, Utah. Do they have problems and concerns about their children? of course, but most of those who grow up Amish return to the fold if they leave. It is not a perfect culture, but it is far from primitive. BTW there is an Amish community in N eastern PA next to a community of Haradi Jews there is some intermarriage and both communities respect each other. In spite of differences of religion they get along, something we could take a lesson from.

That is an important and well-articulated distinction, Artler. Of course, my point still stands that modern commercial culture is such a big draw that any even mildly conservative tradition is hard-pressed to maintain itself.



I think it is superior. It’s just not one that I would prefer.



This is good news. When we are done destroying ourselves by imitating too closely Sodom and Gomorrah, we will need that genetic base, if you will, of cultural vibrancy remaining in order to start anew.



Think of some whacked-out San Francisco gay “pride” parade. I am practically a Haredi Jew compared to that. I’m not surprised that these two communities would be simpatico.

Let us now pause to thank those fathers who (by and large) didn’t give us something for nothing. We had to work for it, although little brothers usually look upon big brothers as a potential cargo cult of old toys and other hand-me-downs.

It is interesting that the more orthodox the faith, excepting Islam, the more compatible they are together. It was only when Christianity became more liberal that it became more aggressive to Jews and even to other varieties of Christian faith like the Cathars. Today the most anti-Semitic so called Christians are almost always on the social justice/liberal side of the spectrum. One of the growing Christian movements is the messianic Christians who follow the 612 commandments, Hollidays and customs but accept Jesus as the true messiah. Some of these groups have even moved to Israel.

It must be some culture shock for them and the average Israeli. Christians who follow the commandants and keep kosher and Jews who don't keep kosher, carry guns and don't own pawnshops and have the largest per capita Nobel laureates of any country in the world. G-d has a very Jewish sense of humor.